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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12036 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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Should we discuss Signalgate? No, not the time Republican leaders embarrassed themselves by inviting a journalist into their private top secret (almost-literally) group chat. The new and improved Signalgate in Minnesota.

Many people have noted the coordinated nature of the "I'm-not-touching-you" mostly-non-violent stalking and harassing of ICE in Minnesota. I have also noted that included in their list of targets were just random people in the wrong kind of car.

Some conservative journalists and activists have been able gain access and insight to the method of coordination - a massive Signal chat where people divide into different roles and then join training sessions, read a manual, and then go off into the streets to take part in a coordinated effort to prevent ICE from arresting people and with the long term goal of ICE no longer enforcing bipartisan and popular federal law in the city of Minneapolis.

The roles are as follows:

  1. Patrol of various kinds - foot, car, stationary (not sure what a stationary patrol is.) They look out for suspicious people, activity, or vehicles and then notify dispatch. Also join in mobbing once a federal official has been located.
  2. Dispatch - people who assess the information coming from patrols and decide to send people out to harass what they presume are federal agents enforcing federal law.
  3. License plate checker - here is where it gets interesting to me. They have people who are able to check license plates to identify the driver. In the case of a rental car, they are able to identify who rented it. This indicates someone is misusing their access to government databases.
  4. Commuters - Their word for people who stalk what they presume are federal officials or hostile journalists with their cars.
  5. Medics/aftercare - people who help those who have been injured or pepper sprayed for breaching the peace and trying to impede federal officers from enforcing the law.
  6. Donors and others providing material support towards the cause, including providing housing assistance.

Here's where it gets speculative: one of the admins on the group has the Username "Flan Southside" which many suspect is Minnesota Lt. Governor Peggy Flannigan. I'm not sure if there is evidence beyond just the name similarity, but one member of the Signal chat seemed to think (after these rumors became wide spread) that "Flan has been exposed." and the Signal member was going to go to Cuba where they had friends. Of course, by this point, the entire chat could be filled with Right Wingers trolling.

Also, it seems like Good and Pretti (seriously, good and pretty? How does this happen?) were members of the Signal chat and were being coordinated by the Signal Dispatch during their fatal encounters with Homeland Security.

At what point is this no longer just people exercising their first amendment rights? At what point is this a conspiracy to undermine the laws of this country resulting in the deaths of two people ?

I saw an interesting take retweeted by Elon from Eric Schwalm, a retired green beret who operated during the GWOT. Reproduced here:

As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops—both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations—I’ve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly.

What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.

Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.

This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s.

The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers—complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal—you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.

I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night.

Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war.

We either recognize what we’re actually looking at—or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread.

Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore. It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.

I wonder like /u/Gillitrut mentioned - what legal remedies are available here, under what law would the administration fight this, if this is an actual insurgency? Is this why I hear so much on the right about invoking the insurrection act? What is interesting about that (according to my lawyer and personal constitutional scholar, Grok) is it does not do away with civilian courts, laws or constitutional protections - and if the courts are captured (can’t get judges to sign arrest warrants, can’t get prosecutors to prosecute, can’t get juries to convict, etc etc) then what is beyond that, if the insurrection act even if invoked is still hogtied by judiciary capture?

This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition.

This entire wall of text is from ChatGPT. Is there any signal in this noise at all?

Everyone outside this forum is baking their own thoughts in LLM ovens, but what I noticed here is the baker (here’s hoping this isn’t an AI-generated warrant officer!) and the framing of the activity, supported by the signal chat leak. Does anyone else who has experience with insurgencies have a take on Minneapolis we can read?

I started my career in Afghanistan. I don't have anything interesting to say except that the problem in both cases was the media. There was never a genuine kinetic threat that would cause the Coalition to fail. The coalition was winning by denying the Taliban access to wealthy cities. There was no reason the deployment couldn't have become a low intensity denial of movement operation around key population hubs indefinitely. But the media called it the forever war and assumed it had to end one day (plenty of occupations don't, actually, end).

If you're interested in reducing risk of civil war you need to deal with the media. If you can't deal with the media you can't reduce risk. How you deal with it is a whole other problem. But I'm of the opinion every single military/government operation needs an extremely robust media strategy, treated like a win condition. Because we keep losing winning wars due to hostile media reporting.

The surge worked in Iraq. We were preventing Afghan women from entering a lifetime of servitude in Afghanistan. And ICE is enforcing a federal (but unpopular) law. And all three of these have been defeated by the media.

Governments need to realise that without media support these operations will fail.

The WO who posted that tweet is a shooter. He wants to go shoot high value targets (figuratively I hope) in the anti-ICE protests. He needs to recognise that this isn't the path to victory. The structural insurgent groups he believes are forming are a problem. But they're a second order effect of the broader media campaign that is rallying these groups under a banner. Just like ISIS, young people are vulnerable to these types of calls to arms.

The structural insurgent groups he believes are forming are a problem. But they're a second order effect of the broader media campaign that is rallying these groups under a banner.

My only... quibble? addition?- is that there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg of whether the structural groups are caused by the media, or cause the media. Journolist and Ezra Klein of NYT fame was deliberately trying to shape the media framing of things as far back as the later 2000s. This doesn't even go into The Resistance phase of Trump 1, in which various media actors were willing partners in coordinated instigation, or some of the Biden-era totally-organic media campaigns.

I can agree that the structural insurgent groups in this discussion are downstream of the broader media campaign, but the structure with intent to resist had media allies/participants/collaborators from the start. The broader media campaign in this context is itself a product of structural insurgent groups. Even if the nature of the media insurgent groups is different from the whistle-blowing groups, that itself is consistent with the nature of those GWOT networks-of-networks.

I think I'd say that even if media comes second, it's a major force multiplier. You can have 500 guys in a city who all really want to fight ICE. But the NYT seal of approval turns that 500 into 50,000. Legacy media retains the prestige to set the ethical tone of these kinds of things, despite having fuck all readers. And their power to endorse or condemn movements is what matters to a lot of these protest groups. Most of protesting is signaling, and purely signaling. You need to be confident you're on the right side, and you need a third party you trust to make that clear. Prestigious media organisations can still act as those arbitrators.

The broader media campaign in this context is itself a product of structural insurgent groups. Even if the nature of the media insurgent groups is different from the whistle-blowing groups, that itself is consistent with the nature of those GWOT networks-of-networks.

Yes I agree. Which is why I'm saying the number one problem these types of anti-insurgency campaign need to deal with is that media campaign. You can tell everybody ISIS is evil because they are, and they relish in that. Working out how to do that with "save the whales" guys, who project via media that they're just trying to stop a hispanic mother of 5 from being deported is a very hard problem.

I am just noting I agree with this argument in general / don't feel we were disagreeing over anything in particular as much as emphasis or some order of operations, and have nothing else to add.

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